Upcoming Events

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April 11, 2024

Claiming Space in the “Birthplace of America:” Latin American Immigrants and Struggles for Belonging in Williamsburg, Virginia

4:00 p.m. (In person)

The speaker for this event is Jennifer Bickham Mendez, PhD, Professor and Chair of Sociology at William & Mary.

HRC Speaker Series

Gaynell Sherrod and her book — Gaynell Sherrod

April 22, 2024

Reading the Invisible Script: How Black Dance Pioneers of the 1930s-40s Danced Between the Lines

12:00 p.m. (Online)

The speaker for this event is E. Gaynell Sherrod, PhD, dance educator, choreographer, historian, and professor in the Department of Dance + Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Meet VCU Authors

April 27, 2024

The Afterlives of Medical Exploitation: The East Marshall Street Well Project Symposium

10:00 a.m. (In person)

The Health Humanities Lab at the Humanities Research Center will host a mini-symposium on the work of the East Marshall Street Well Project, underscoring its critical importance not only for VCU as it grapples with its own history of medical racism but also for other institutions nationally as they contend with their own similar histories.

HRC Events

New Event Videos

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Medicine Literature and a Desire Called Utopia

Rishi Goyal, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Medical Humanities major, Columbia University

The Borders of AIDS and the Uses of Disease

Karma Chávez, PhD, MPH
Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Department Chair, UT Austin

Faculty Spotlight: Brian Daugherity

Written by Maggie Unverzagt Goddard, Postdoctoral Fellow, History Dept.; Associate Director, Health Humanities Lab; Co-Director, Public Humanities Lab

As the Co-Director of the Public Humanities Lab at the HRC, Brian Daugherity draws on his extensive experience using collaboration as a methodology. Combining history and education, his work is not just limited to learning about the past; rather, Daugherity focuses on the past to learn important lessons and to find how it connects with the present.

Brian Daugherity's research focuses on the implementation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in Virginia. He teaches courses on the History of the Civil Rights Movement, the History of Virginia, and the History of the United States since 1865. Daugherity also has taught a number of traveling courses, including an interdisciplinary class on the civil rights movement in the South, and another on the history of Virginia via a month-long boating trip down the James River.

In 2014, Daugherity co-taught “Footprints on the James: The Human and Natural History of Virginia” with James Vonesh and Dan Carr, two VCU biology professors, to explore the history and biology of the James River watershed, and how the two disciplines overlap and intersect. Along with their students, the faculty traveled a roughly 150-mile section of the James via sea kayak, canoe, raft, and bateau while backpacking and camping along the way... [Read the full spotlight]